Rainbow City chief hopes to find new information in 1984 murder

Saturday

Jul 5, 2014 at 12:01 AMJul 5, 2014 at 11:37 PM

Almost 30 years ago, Rainbow City Police Chief Greg Carroll worked at Goodyear, and he made a nightly stop at what was then the Mini-Mart on Rainbow Drive for a soft drink or a candy bar on his way to work.

By Donna ThorntonTimes Staff Writer

Almost 30 years ago, Rainbow City Police Chief Greg Carroll worked at Goodyear, and he made a nightly stop at what was then the Mini-Mart on Rainbow Drive for a soft drink or a candy bar on his way to work.“It was my ritual,” he said, and it let him get to know clerk Rita Cornutt, a nice lady who always greeted customers and talked.When Carroll passed the station on the night of Aug. 6, 1984, and saw it roped off with crime scene tape, he knew something was wrong. He later read that the 57-year-old Cornutt had been killed in an apparent robbery at the store. No one was ever charged with her murder.Years would pass before Carroll went to work at the Rainbow City Police Department. In 1993, as an investigator, he pulled out the case file and took it home with him, spreading it out on his kitchen table to look for information that might offer some sort of lead in the cold case.“I worked on it for a while, even went to Birmingham to talk to someone in prison,” Carroll said, but he never got a break in the case. After a time, he was instructed to turn attention to current cases, and efforts to look into the case languished.But Rita Cornutt wasn't forgotten. Her son, Ronald Chambell, called the Rainbow City Police Department recently from Texas, as he often has through the years to ask what's being done on the case.“I call all the time, because that's my mother,” Chambell said.“Every police report I've looked at is as fresh to me now as it was in 1984,” Chambell said. He lived in Michigan at the time, but he would come to Alabama in the winter when he was laid off from construction work to spend time with his mother.“I loved my mother very much,” he said. “They called me at 2 in the morning. I thought someone was playing a joke on me when they told me my mother was murdered. I hung up on them.“But my uncle called back and said, 'Ron, Ron, don't hang up,'” Chambell recalled. “He told me it was true.”On the night of Aug. 6, 1984, a couple stopped at the Mini Mart and the man went inside to buy something while his wife waited in the car. They saw a man with the hood up on his car in the parking lot, and the customer offered to help. Sometime after the couple left, another customer came in, about 9:37 p.m. She left immediately and called police, reporting she'd seen a woman behind the counter, and blood.Looking at the file opened on the case in 1984, Carroll said the officers at the scene found Cornutt behind the counter. She'd been stabbed once in the chest and once in the lower part of the back. Investigators determined $245 in cash and a check for $25 had been taken from the store. Then Rainbow City detectives Morris Alexander and Kirby Johnston investigated the case.In 1989, Rainbow City police released an artist's drawing of the man the couple saw in the parking lot. The man was believed to have been in a brown AMC Gremlin, reportedly in rough shape. He was described as a white male with a dark complexion and a medium to heavy build, 5 feet 8 inches to 6 feet tall, 25 to 30 years of age.According to newspaper reports at the time of the crime, a man jailed in Gadsden for burglary was considered a suspect, but no charges were filed.Investigators developed another suspect, one with a tie to the family, but he couldn't be found after the crime occurred. From what Carroll has found in the case file, that suspect was never interviewed.Chambell, who lives in Texas now, always has believed that suspect is responsible for his mother's death.At the store, he said, no one could have gotten behind the counter, where she was stabbed, unless she let them in. “She had to buzz them in.”He believes she had to have known the person who killed her.“She was stabbed in the back first,” Chambell said, then turned around and fought with her killer.“Then he stabbed her in the heart,” he said, “for a lousy 300 bucks.”Chambell was in his late 30s when his mother was killed, devastating him, his older brother Michael and his young brother Johnny, now deceased. They also have a half-sister, Lisa.Chambell said his mother grew up in the Gadsden area. “She lived on 'the mountain,'” he recalled. News reports at the time listed her address as Delmont Drive.“When people came in the store, if they didn't have money she'd go ahead and let them get groceries, then come pay her when they got their check,” Chambell recalled.“I just want to find the people who did my mother wrong,” he said. “I'd just have one question: 'Why?' It breaks my heart.”Carroll said the Cornutt murder has haunted him. “I liked the lady. We became friends. I saw her every night,” he said.“It always bothered me,” he said, that her murder went unsolved.It is the only major unsolved case the Rainbow City police have, Carroll said, but it's not about the department's track record.“This is an important case,” he said. “We owe it to her family,” to look at the case again.Carroll hopes anyone who might remember anything about the case will contact Rainbow City investigators. Over time, he said, people sometimes find a past bad act weighs on them, and they have to tell someone about it, and sometimes that person tells someone else.“And then someone gets mad,” Carroll said, and is willing to talk.He hopes that's the case in this cold case.Carroll asked anyone with information on the case to call the Rainbow City Police Department at 256-442-2511.

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